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Apart from those who can't stand horror or any zombie movie at all, those of us who can and actually enjoy zombie movies can tell how fun and thrilling they can be. Apart from the suspense and the near death experience that tingles in your heart, it could almost make you wet your pants but that wouldn't stop us from watching it either. From " the walking dead" to "resident evil", "day of the dead" and the latest being "Army of the dead", the entertainment industry has thrilled us over and over with many zombie movies. The thrill and excitement keeps increasing over the years as the best producers create amazing content that drives our imagination wild with fear and the undead. But then have you ever stopped to wonder how the concept of zombie started or who was the first to come up with this theory?
Well the zombie concept actually originated from the Haitian slaves who worked for French masters. These mythological undead beings that are created through the reanimation of a corpse usually from voodoo started from sugar plantations. These unstoppable flesh cravers have become a huge force in the entertainment industry over the decades and now it doesn't seem like we'll be seeing the end of them just yet. Although modern zombies has projected in movies we see lately usually arise from a vector, a disease or many other factors which are far from the original source zombies are created from. These can be attributed to what the audience wants to see or how creative the scriptwriter can be.
These folklore which originated in Haiti as far back as the 17th century when West African slaves were forced to work on sugar plantations till death. Reports say this brutality made slaves long for freedom from their lives because their working conditions or their lives resembled that of a zombie. Some part of West Africa where Voodoo is practiced believe they can bring people back from the dead as zombies. A concept which is no entertainment or joke to them because they create concoctions from many ingredients which actually cause one to come back to life after death. Although these concoctions have been found to contain a deadly neurotoxin which at the right dose is capable of causing zombie like symptoms like difficulty walking properly or mental confusions which are typical of a zombie. These dose have to be exact as well or it could cause death, it would cause a person to seem dead for a while only to be revived later which made people assume the concept of zombie even more around that time.
The word itself is thought to have originated from West African languages- ndzumbi meaning corpse and nzambi meaning "spirit of a dead person". Although the movies we see today have totally different concept from the original zombie concept, it has been noted to began to appear in literatures as far back as 1647 and is now being portrayed even in children cartoons like Scooby-Doo.
